Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Sandman Page! (Wacky Week of April 4th)

[Updated]

Man, this was a beast!

I mentioned a couple weeks ago my intention to do a different comic page a week, just to keep different art muscles in shape. For my first one I selected a page from an issue of Sandman, Neil Gaiman's excellent and indispensable series. He worked with a host of collaborators on the book, and the arc that I drew (no pun intended) this page from was originally drawn by Kelly Jones, an excellent artist.

I found the actual script for this page online, and so I was able to avoid 'starting' from where Jones had left off. It can be difficult, in the case of a very strong artist, determining your own blueprint. It can seem so natural, the storytelling choices that've already been made, and you run the risk of just reinterpreting the printed page, rather than drawing your own version of it. It's a fairly thin distinction but I believe it's a crucial one.

I am happy with how this turned out. The pencils are incredibly tight, but I wanted something that looked 'done'. I got to get a little Art Nouveau and P. Craig Russell (there's a large overlap between those two, really) in the art. It was a lot of fun.